Posted on Tuesday, April 14 2015 @ 19:02 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Following continued complaints about the performance of old data on the Samsung 840 EVO SSDs, the company has promised to issue a new fix sometime later this month. Samsung issued a patch for the low read speeds with old data in October, but after a couple of months people noticed the issue resurfaced. The upcoming firmware update will include something called "periodic refresh", which seems to be a feature that automatically rewrites the old data to bring read performance back up to speed.
Samsung revised the firmware algorithm to maintain consistency in performance for old data under exceptional circumstances. Therefore, read performance was restored without the need for Magician. This algorithm is based on a periodic refresh feature that can maintain the read performance of this older data. The algorithm does not affect normal user scenarios (i.e. occasional PC performance degradation due to background work of SSD) or the lifespan of an SSD and can actively maintain its performance without the help of Magician. However, this algorithm does not operate when the power is off.
The read performance has been improved by the revised firmware algorithm. If performance recovery is slow in instances where the SSD did not have enough run-time for the firmware algorithm to reach normal performance levels, or similarly, had been powered off for an extended amount of time, the performance can be recovered by using the Advanced Performance Optimization feature in Magician 4.6. This is a supplementary feature to maintain normal performance for a few exceptional circumstances.
Users can upgrade to the new firmware through Magician 4.6, without using the performance restoration tool.
Source: The Tech Report
